mp3 demos

Just like a harpsichord, a spinet's sound is still relevant in many musical territories, while at the same time being connected to the musical works of its time.

The brilliant timbre comprises lots of majestic warmth and elegance as well - something often underestimated due to sterile sounding spinet simulations of current keyboards and samplers.

The English Spinet library features an instrument built by Thomas Hitchcock in London in 1718. Hitchcocks instruments are widely known as the best-sounding spinets ever built and pointed the way ahead for all spinets to come. Only about 36 of his masterpieces are preserved to this day.

Hitchock spinet - photo: Andreas E. Beurmann

The instrument still remains in good condition and is fully playable despite its age. It is now available for your sampler within the English Spinet library, presented in its original Valotti tuning at 403 Hz (Presets in 440 Hz are included, too).

Like harpsichords, spinets are not touch-sensitive in the sense of a piano. However, even if the differences are minuscule, not any given note will sound exactly the same due to different resonances of body and strings.

Until now, many keyboards and samplers represented spinets by triggering off the exact same digital sample, leaving said sterile sounding impression.To pay tribute to the liveliness and depth of this historical instrument, we captured 8 variations of each note.

The key release sounds are also of major importance: What was originally side noise is now often overlooked and even simply left out in simulations, resulting in an abstract overall picture. Therefore, we recorded 4 release samples of each note.

Presets are included for HAlion®, Kontakt® (full version required)and EXS24® software samplers.